Customer relationship management (CRM) is used by organizations to manage their relationships with customers, including collecting, storing and analyzing customer information. Customer relationship management can be as simple as knowing a customer's address, however, most CRM systems go beyond that, containing information related to the customer such as, for example, information related to interests, hobbies, income, number of family members, etc. To obtain this information is one reason that many manufacturers and sellers provide questions on registration forms asking for such information. However, this type of data gathering can also be performed in a production system for putting information into a CRM database. For example, when a person utilizes the Internet to view and/or purchase products online, the person may be presented with a number of choices, and the person's selections are delivered to a system for generating an output based on the selections and sending the corresponding material to the purchaser.
In some cases, the web ordering front end is in a position to capture information about the selections and feed it directly into a CRM information gathering system. For example, a selected book might be sports related, e.g., or the topic might be related to golfing, and this information can be stored in the CRM database. This data can then be farmed for delivering targeted advertising via mail, e-mail, etc. Large companies within internet presence such as, e.g., Amazon.com have systems which perform the CRM gathering service. However, CRM gathering systems typically require a large up-front investment for a tailor made CRM system which performs the required information gathering. In many cases, the web ordering system may not be a core part of the business, or may not be a large business, and such a large investment may not be justified. Still, many smaller businesses would benefit from an online presence and would further benefit from being able to capture data related to online purchases such as, e.g., words or terms related to the purchased products. Therefore, there exists a need for an inexpensive and easily implemented method of gathering information related to the purchased products for entering into a separate stand-alone CRM system or for other processing such as, e.g., manual review.